To make himself
acceptable to whites, Obama finds it necessary to shout

out how unacceptable he
finds the conduct of other Blacks. As could

have been expected,
corporate headline editors had a field day

Obama
Insults Half a Race

By Glen Ford

The Democratic
presidential nominee-apparent seldom speaks directly to
Black people, but when he does it is usually to denounce
individuals once close to him or to criticize The Race
in general for some moral failing. Thus it was no
surprise that Barack Obama used the occasion of Father's
Day to give Black males the back of his hand, no doubt
to the delight of millions of potential white
supporters. Black males have "abandoned their
responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men," said
Obama, citing statistics on female-headed households.
"You and I know how true this is in the African-American
community."

Even the
New York Times could see through Obama's transparent
bid for white approval at Black people's expense.
Reporter Julie Bosman noted that Obama "laid out his
case in stark terms that would be difficult for a white
candidate to make"—terms (such as boy?) that "his
campaign hopes [will] resonate among white social
conservatives in a race where these voters may be up for
grabs."

In effect, Obama is
following an established American electoral tradition of
running against Black people. He claims to be teaming up
with Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh to promote legislation to
combat a "national epidemic of absentee fathers."
However, Obama's church rant was anything but
"race-neutral"—it was targeted directly at Black males.
By selecting the politically conservative (in Black
terms) Apostolic Church of God as the venue for his
blanket Black male denunciation, Obama also reminded
whites that he is no longer a member of Trinity United
Church of Christ, formerly pastored by Rev. Jeremiah
Wright, also located on Chicago's South Side.

To make himself
acceptable to whites, Obama finds it necessary to shout
out how unacceptable he finds the conduct of other
Blacks. As could have been expected, corporate headline
editors had a field day: "Obama Tells Black Fathers to
Act Like Men" (AFP),
"Obama Calls on Black Men to Be Better Fathers" (U.S.
News & World Report), "Black Fathers Missing From
Too Many Lives" (The
Age), "Obama Calls for More Responsibility From
Black Fathers" (NYT).
Words like these are music to the ears of those who
blame African American "pathology" for the ills of the
ghetto and the nation as a whole, especially the "Reagan
Democrats" Obama so
shamelessly woos.

Can one imagine
Obama or any other presidential aspirant repeatedly
hectoring any other ethnic group on moral issues?
Singling out Jews for excessive materialism? The Irish
for excessive drinking? Of course not; that would be
unfair and politically suicidal. But there are large
regions of the white body politic in which it is not
only acceptable, but damn near required, that
politicians demonstrate their impatience with the
alleged moral shortcomings of Black people. Barack Obama
trolls for votes in those foul waters, at the cost of
Black people's dignity.

Obama's two young
daughters were seated in the church, upfront, to hear
their father call other Black men "boys" with no sense
of responsibility. Ironically, a key Black rationale for
supporting Obama is that he is a great "role model" for
Black children. Imagine that: an ethnic role model,
whose ostensible purpose is to make The Race proud, yet
who with great fanfare periodically sneers at the
supposedly debased morality of his own people. That's
close to the definition of sick.

Black-Basher, Power
Worshipper

Obama goes
race-specific-negative on Black people whenever it is
useful in attracting white electoral support. Otherwise,
he is studiously "race neutral"—a cynical device he
deploys to avoid recognizing the pervasiveness of racial
wrongs against African Americans. The candidate
periodically offers loud and specific criticisms of
Blacks, but prescribes no programs—not one—to
address specific Black grievances. He feels quite secure
with this cruel and crooked campaign posture, confident
that no significant complaint will emanate from African
American quarters - they are loyal, no matter what. And
for that reason, they need not be respected.

The Black burden is
even heavier than that. African Americans are expected
to circle the wagons at the merest hint of racist
threats to the candidate. Any slight to Obama, real or
imagined, must be met with massive Black response, while
Obama's disregard of Black priorities and sensibilities
is endlessly forgivable. At the commonsensical level,
the entire Obama-Black folks relationship is so bizarre
as to seem insane. The candidate has been imposed on the
African American polity by corporate forces in the
Democratic Party, of which he is a loyal, Harvard-vetted
operative. He constantly swears fealty to the white
American civic religions of American Exceptionalism and
Manifest Destiny, both rooted in race supremacy. He has
proven his devotion to this ghastly Euro-American
mythology and worldview, through public denunciation of
liberation theology and ritual separation from one of
its major institutions. He bows to imperial power and
its endless expansion, fully aware that, as Dr. Martin
Luther King phrased it
40 years ago, the military will "draw men and skills
and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,"
draining all hope for creation of a just society.

"Obama bows to
imperial power and its endless expansion."

Obama is no Prince
of Peace—more like Damion, of
The Omen. His peace-savaging
declaration earlier this month that "Jerusalem will
remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain
undivided" expressed a position that no U.S. government
has ever taken, that no Arab government can accept and,
as Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery
has written, "has disappeared—quietly, almost
secretly - from the arsenal of official [Israeli]
slogans." Translation: Obama is more hyper-Zionist on
Jerusalem than the Israelis themselves, more than
successive American governments that have never formally
recognized Jerusalem as the capital or as wholly
Israeli. He is emphatically outside the possible
parameters of peace in the most volatile region of the
planet. Obama is not a peace candidate.

To point up how
hawkish Obama has shown himself to be in his groveling
before the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
no less than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was
dispatched to Jerusalem this past weekend to
caution the Israelis against building further
housing for Jews in the western part of city, lest they
have "a negative effect on the atmosphere for the
negotiation" with Palestinians. Obama is to the Right of
Rice, who had to journey to Israel to try to clean up
the mess he made at the AIPAC meeting in Washington!
Predictably, the Israelis rebuked Rice. After all, they
can look forward to an even more pliant Obama
administration.

Obama has expressed
willingness to
militarily violate the sovereignty of Pakistan—home of the A Q Khan nuclear proliferation racket and,
along with Israel, among the wildest nuclear cards in
the planetary deck—and to launch "surgical"
strikes against Iran, a catastrophe of unimaginable
dimensions.

Is he John McCain?
No, and that's literally as much as can be said with any
degree of certainty.

Phony ‘Movement'

Most of the
commentary and pseudo-reporting about the campaign
amounts to ramblings of the insane. Insanity is the
logical product of a culture rooted in plunder, genocide
and slavery. There are no guarantees that social
structures marinated in such evil can ultimately be made
habitable. Madness in, madness out. Only the most
courageous, sustained popular struggle can even hope to
distill civilization from its opposite. The Black
Freedom Movement, embedded in the history of The
Americas, could have been - and might yet become - the
great engine of general liberation.

But no
transformation is possible if the Great Diversion and
Illusion of Obamamania chokes the sense and
consciousness out of Black America - a true pathology
that has already rendered folks previously considered
among the "best and brightest" among African Americans
deaf, dumb, blind and at the feet of their utterly false
Messiah.

The general African
American rush to touch Obama's garments is
understandable - not rational, but explicable - as the
product of 400 years of frustrated yearnings for
"deliverance" by "our own" hands. Add two parts willful
self-delusion plus eight parts corporate public
manipulation (the "hope" mantra, which conjures up
totally different visions in the minds of different
consumers), and a full blown dream-savior appears.

Black "leadership,"
especially on the left side of the African American
political spectrum (which, as a polity, is distinctly to
the left of the white American spectrum), has shamefully
packaged Obama as a progressive, knowing full well he is
not. This is cowardice: the "leaders" fear having to
tell Black folks the truth, which would require that
they provide real and risky political direction that
challenges Obama, the Man Who Would Like To Be Called
Joshua (see
Obama, Selma). Black leaders would have to disabuse
the people of their illusions, and explain that
Obama's/Joshua's destination for the multitudes is not
Black self-determination, true racial justice and peace—about which he fundamentally differs from the
Historical Black Political Consensus—but a one-day
trip to the ballot box to benefit himself, followed by
four years of even more malign neglect than he has shown
Blacks heretofore in the campaign.

"A true pathology
has rendered folks previously considered among the ‘best
and brightest' among African Americans deaf, dumb, blind
and at the feet of their utterly false Messiah."

Having led no one
anywhere recently, the Obama-backing "leaders" pretend
that the candidate's popularity in the presidential race
is the equivalent of a "movement." It is no such thing,
and they and Obama know it. Obama's claim to be at the
head of a movement is no surprise, part of his slick M.O.,
signifying nothing. The last thing any politician wants
is to be bothered with movements. They are, at the very
least, distractions to the smooth running of
governments, which seek to be unencumbered by meddlesome
popular demands. More to the point, Obama doesn't see
any need for a specifically "Black" movement, since
African Americans have already "come 90 percent of the
way" to equality, as he proclaimed in Selma, last year.

He made clear in
his Philadelphia "Race
Speech" three months ago that Black-centered
complaints are "divisive at a time when we need unity;
racially charged at a time when we need to come together
to solve a set of monumental problems—two wars, a
terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health
care crisis and potentially devastating climate change;
problems that are neither black or white or Latino or
Asian, but rather problems that confront us all."

Obama wants to shut
down what's left of the Black Freedom Movement. He's
getting help from panicked and unprincipled Black Left
misleaders who contort their former politics beyond
recognition in order to attach themselves, mostly
uninvited, to a corporate campaign that tries to
masquerade in movement clothing. They meekly offer
insubstantial but nevertheless unwelcome advice to
unhearing campaign operatives on how to make the
campaign appear more like a genuine people's mass
political vehicle, as if Goldman Sachs and the other
Wall Streeters who made Obama the early money
frontrunner would tolerate interference in their
behind-the-curtain rule.

McKinney
Candidacy Plus People's Movement

There is a
presidential candidate who is Black, a proven
progressive, a person of courage and unchallenged
integrity. Cynthia McKinney, running on a
Power to the People platform for the Green Party
nomination, wants to rebuild a real movement. Peace and
racial and social justice cannot be achieved absent a
popular movement, which in the United States must be led
by African Americans. Presidential aspirant Barack Obama
has never faced movement scrutiny, because Black
"progressive" leaders rolled over like puppies (minus
the cuteness) without initially presenting even strong
policy suggestions, much less demands, to Obama's
corporate campaign. Not satisfied with neutering
themselves, they encouraged Black people as a body to
become
irrelevant. Now, they are objects of derision, fare
game for Obama's piercing scowl.

A vote (and/or
contribution) for Cynthia McKinney, the former
congresswoman from Georgia, signals that you have not
been fooled by the corporate handmaiden, Obama, and his
"progressive" apologists. It means you are ready to
build a movement in which periodic electoral politics is
a secondary appendage to 24-7 mass struggle.

It means that you
support a woman who genuinely loves people and would
never defame half a race on Father's Day.

First of
all, Barack Obama's
speech is a betrayal of trust. He put himself forward as a new breed of
politician and as soon as he wins the primaries, we get the same old
stomp-down-black-men trope. Why is it that every political candidate,
including Barack Obama, feels free and obligated to take pot shots at
black men standing before media cameras. Every political candidate
hungers for his validating Willie Horton moment. It's not just
fathers but the emphasis on black fathers that Obama takes his shots,
primarily poor black fathers. Are there no black fathers besides himself
(and poor) who meet their responsibilities? Why from these high profile
celebrities we never have congratulatory remarks about black fathers,
whether living with the mothers of their children, or not? Like in the
Coates book The Beautiful Struggle? If such an address was made
by a white candidate there would be cries of racism. But Barack Obama
gets wings for his remarks. His audience was primarily black women so I
suppose he received several standing ovations. If he becomes president I
suppose we can expect more disparaging self-help commentary. The next
time it will be all black communities under his sights.—Rudy

* * * * *

Hey there:

Of course all black fathers are not
spectacles; however, enough are missing in action and have been for many
years that it has caused a crisis in our community. It is no secret -
the statistics show it and our communities validate that there is a
problem. I do not see a problem with people calling it out. It does
not appear that Obama’s father was too involved in his life and he is
probably calling on his experience concerning his own father and looking
at the obvious problems in the African-American community. Who should
stand on the wall and tell men to be men? Too many have been silent and
it is about time that somebody speaks out. (Yes, and I like how Bill
Cosby stands on the wall too) Someone has to do it. The truth is a
mirror and we don't also like what we see or hear but it is what it is.
I hope that you are well.— Jennifer

* * * * *

Who should stand on the wall and tell men to be men?—Jennifer

No man who is a millionaire or a billionaire can stand on the wall
and shout insults at the poor and the oppressed for their failings. That kind of behavior
cannot be tolerated from above. Context is everything. Absent black
dads in less than a bourgeois role is not a cultural or moral problem in
large measure, as implied by Obama's speech. The condition of black
men is an economic problem that didn't begin yesterday. It is a
historical problem of racial oppression that began with the slavery of
black men and has persisted until today in double-digit unemployment,
low wages, and high incarceration rates.

This is not an excuse. This is the
harsh reality of black life, one in which Obama grandstands to woo the
perpetrators of these conditions. That Obama desires to divide the black
community along gender lines is politically inexcusable. Moreover, to say "black fathers"
are acting like "boys" is pointing the finger at all black men. Obama is
not talking about all fathers but rather about all black men. That is
the political problem, the racist problem, of his speech. And this guy
is supposed to end divisiveness!

That one is unable to afford a
household does not determine manhood. And we do not need an Obama to
determine what are the contours of black manhood. I regret that so many
black women find the "responsibility" argument so plausible and
believable. But that divisive seed has been growing since the 80s. Obama
watered it by his church-based speech. The crisis of the black communities
that you note is a sign of the growing political repression of black
communities, caused mostly from without because of an economy that has
an uneven economic impact based primarily on racist responses of
employers and government. I was certain that I was going to vote for Obama in
November. Now I am not so certain.—Rudy

* * * * *

Hey Rudy:

I understand your point; however, I still stand by what I have said. And
if the person is a millionaire, billionaire, or dirt poor let her or him
stand on the wall. I do not think that it is right to put down all
black fathers (I implied that before) but the ones who are trifling,
shiftless, and do nothings need to get it together and I am not angered
by a black man who tells them to do so - hopefully he too has his
fatherly duties together. Have you emailed your concern to the Obama
camp? If not, I suggest that you do so—they need to hear your concern.
Luv ya back!—Jennifer

This tame tome was ostensibly
carefully crafted with the intent of enabling Senator Obama to be all
things to all people. Unfortunately, it ends up reading like little more
than the transparent game plan of a guileful politician. When discussing
racism, he comes off as no liberal, but more in the “content of your
character” camp as advocated by African-American neo-cons like Shelby
Steele and John McWhorter. In this regard, he has no problem putting the
onus on blacks to accommodate themselves to the mainstream culture,
because “members of every minority group continue to be measured largely
by the degree of our assimilation.”

Obama goes on to conclude that “the
single biggest thing” we could do to reduce inner-city poverty “is to
encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children
out of wedlock.” If these sort of simplistic “blaming the victim”
pronouncements are truly Barack’s best ideas on how to reclaim the
American Dream, I suggest he keep dreaming.—Kam

* * * * *

Obama is of African descent but he is not an African American of African
descent, like Michelle. He does not understand that he can't begin a
conversation with American Blacks with that "My life used to be just
like yours" gambit. Why not? Because that is the very same opening that
people who speak down to African Americans use. Even though it is not
his intention to speak down to them, nonetheless he is also not speaking
up to them: he is not reaching for solutions but for attitudes. Someone
one day is going to ask him where his attitude comes from? Or perhaps
he'll learn in time.—Mackie

* * * * *

Why do these negro men object to the reality of our grossest behavior?.
A negro man murdered my sister, a negro man murdered my youngest
daughter. You want to excuse this with fear of exposure. Just stand up,
for all of our sakes!—Amiri

* * * * *

I do not excuse gross behavior. But you mix apples and oranges. Black
fathers killed neither your sister nor your daughter. Those men who
committed such crimes should be punished for their individual behavior.
All black men should not have to pay their debt. You must read Obama's
statement more carefully:

"Barack Obama celebrated Father's
Day by calling on black fathers, who he said are "missing from too many
lives and too many homes," to become active in raising their children.
"They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of
men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it," the
Democratic presidential candidate said Sunday at a largely black church
in his hometown."

It is more than "a fear of
exposure." These kinds of racist accusations have been going on since
the Moynihan Report of 1965. On this issue of Obama's Father's Day
Speech you have taken the wrong stance.—Rudy

* * * * *

Dear Rudy,

I don't know what is on Obama's mind, but I never
expected that his election would in any direct way have anything to do
with me. In fact, his election might or might not work to my
disadvantage. If more black men had stable,
self-interested economic relationships, they would have the basis for
participation in families, churches, and other institutions. If black
men were not, by and large, systematically shut out from self-interested
economic institutions, they would be more capable of long-term bonding,
and more adept at forming socially profitable institutions. The most
important institutions are economic, and American Negroes were not
brought to this country to participate in self-interested economic
institutions.—Wilson

* * * * *

Rudy, Barack has lately spoken of himself as being an imperfect human
being. No, he does not have all of the answers or solutions to very
complex problems which we face in the 21st century. It will take just
one error in judgment for us to drop him like a hot potato.—Herbert

* * * * *

"Imperfect"—such political calculation goes beyond Obama's imperfect
modesty. This kind of appeasement of white male racism is odious and
stinks to high heaven. I expect more of the same in that he has gone to
Congress to legislate punitive measures against poor black dads. He
wants to enlarge the black prison roles, don't you understand what his
political move is? Black men to be sacrificed on the political auction
block for his winning the presidency—Rudy

* * * * *

With all due respect, please stop
sending me this foolishness. As a black father, Obama has every right to
speak on absent black fathers in our community, and it is the
appropriate and responsible thing to do with the platform he currently
has. This is not taking a "pot shot," this is stating the obvious and
voicing what many of us, men and women, grandmothers and grandfathers,
aunts and uncles, and all the other extended family members think and
feel as we struggle to raise these men's children *without* them or
their positive input or resources.

If the shoe don't fit, please walk on proudly, walk on, or better,
instead of yangyanging about why he's speaking out, please share new
ideas and insights on how we can better assist families. For example,
how do fathers who have been absent from a significant part of their
children's lives, make that important journey back? What strategies can
they use to help establish and build trust with their children? What are
realistic expectations and responses and how do they navigate this
emotional terrain? What organizations and resources are available to
help strengthen their return to their children? How do they establish
contact if their children's mother or other family is resistant to their
involvement?

I could go on, but I hope this is received in the spirit in which it is
given. All Best,SRT

* * * * *

Sheree, social work is not the
answer but rather part of the problem. The daddy problems are
historical, economic and political, as I stated before, rather than
moral or ethical or even a matter of will.

Look, dear hearts, my mother back
in the 40s and 50s and 60s had problems keeping a man in her household
to support her children. Her choice in men were limited largely to those
poor and black. In the 1890s and early 1900s it was the same for our
Grandma Mary, a farmhand for a white farmer and the daughter of a slave,
who had eight sons out of wedlock (by six different men), three of them
by married deacons of the Baptist Church, and one by her white employer,
who did not acknowledge his son. Race and a cold heart caused him not to
meet his economic responsibilities.

I do not know why there are those who think the inability of black men
or other poor men to sustain the lives of their children, whether they
are in the house or not, is recent news. It is now less hidden and the
conditions have become worse.

Obama was looking pass his immediate audience to the white cameras. It
was not a church matter, for black men on the whole have abandoned an
institution that has long abandoned them. The problematic black fathers
were certainly not in that church audience. The problem of the speech is
not complicated. It was politically calculated to appeal to racist white
voters.

I am quite disappointed that so many black women are overtaken by the
slick talk of wealthy charismatic politicians like Barack Obama when it
comes to assessing the dignity and integrity of black men.

What would your response be if Obama had said that black women (that 70
per cent living without a man in the house supporting them)were
irresponsible welfare queens? There are many who would applaud that
kind of statement as well. But black men are an easier mark than black
women. Don't you understand that? Do you remember Bill Clinton's attack
on Sister Souljah. Well, it's the same kind of political gambit, again.

I am not a one issue observer. But this indictment of black men is so
broad and sweeping and so public it is mind blowing. I gave him a pass
on the Palestinians. But I cannot give him a pass when it comes to my
brothers. He must find a way to amend or apologize for his insult. For a
historical first I cannot stand idle while Obama shames and insults my
brothers. A line must be drawn; we blacks cannot tolerate politicians so
brazen and unafraid of the consequences of their speech.

Do this nation and its employers have any economic responsibilities to
black men? On the whole I indict them for their irresponsibility. And
now Obama is supporting legislation that will be more punitive against
black men. We cannot have any half stepping on such issues.

I am looking hard at Cynthia McKinney, hoping that she'll be on the
ballot in Virginia.—Rudy

* * * * *

Obama No—He's a vacuous
opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since
the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for
the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a
vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white
liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political
center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new
directions, is neoliberal. His political repertoire has always included
the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in
exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for
emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a
victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral
pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial
insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the
scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made
infamous.—Adolph
Reed Jr.

* * * * *

Obama and the Criminal Justice System

Barack
Obama delivered another
masterful speech Sunday. The news report I saw made it seem like he
merely did an impersonation of Bill Cosby, but he was more subtle and
sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, it was a speech that Cosby would
be proud of since it did endorse Cosby’s arguments.

Obama said that yes black communities needed more jobs and better
schools and that past injustices did play a role in the absence of
fathers in black homes, but that black people could not use those things
as excuses. He said that black men should not be languishing in prison
when they should be out looking for a job.

There are too many issues here that should be unpacked and discussed for
me to deal with all of them at this point, but I’ll tackle a few.

The injustices are not only in the past. Our current criminal justice
system is biased by race and class as I illustrated last week in
“Whites,Blacks and
Illicit Drugs”. If we had different criminal justice policies
there would be fewer black men in prison. We need to work to eliminate
the race and class biases in the criminal justice system. We need to
expand opportunities for drug treatment. We need to use alternative,
community-based sentencing for certain non-violent offenders. If we had
elected officials who were committed to reforms of this sort, there
would be more black men available to be the fathers that Obama and Cosby
would like to see.

This is a very real issue for black women in the poorest black
communities. Even the conservative (by my standards) scholar Isabel
Sawhill admits that “for certain subgroups of African-American women”
she “did find a shortage of eligible men” for them to marry.
We simply can’t improve the rate of two-parent families in the poorest
black communities without dealing with the present racial injustices in
our criminal justice system.

Obama argues that blacks should not use issues like the lack of jobs,
the high rate of poverty, the high degree of economic inequality as
excuses for the absence of men in black families. But there is a growing
body of research that identifies the lack of jobs, poverty and economic
inequality as important causes of the higher rates of crime in black
communities.2
If we want to keep black men out of prison, we will also need economic
policies to address these issues.

The economic development of poor black communities is also important
because black men who are unemployed are probably less likely to marry.
Poor black women are probably not interested in marrying unemployed
black men. Unemployed black men are probably reluctant to marry if they
cannot contribute financially to the household.

The more education one has the more likely one is to marry.
The issue of the separate and unequal education that black students
receive is, again, not simply an excuse. If we improve the educational
attainment of blacks, we will likely increase marriage rates.

If Obama wishes to increase the marriage rates in black communities, he
needs to (1) recognize the racial disparities in our criminal justice
system as one of the current injustices facing black America, (2)
institute policies that lead to good jobs for blacks, and (3) improve
the quality of black schools. Is Obama able to recognize the importance
of these policies? Will Obama be willing and able to deliver them, if he
does?—Thora
Institute

I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.

Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.

A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—

In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger

In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly